Theatre review: Game of Thrones: The Mad King

In the latest attempt to plug the Les Mis-shaped hole in their budget the RSC have taken a break from Celebrity Antisemite Roal Dahl and moved on to Celebrity Pirate George Arrr! Arrr! Martin, and his A Song of Ice and Fire saga. And Stratford-upon-Avon seems an apt enough home for a story conceived as a fantasy version of the Wars of the Roses since Shakespeare wrote eight* plays about them. And with roughly the same amount of concern for historical accuracy. Game of Thrones Colon The Mad King is the most immediate prequel to the original novels and Game of Thrones TV series yet, and fleshes out events known from the stories but not previously told in this much detail. And there's... certainly no shortage of detail in a play with a cast bigger than some West End musicals and a running time that just scrapes in under the four-hour mark.

Theatre review: Death Note

It's been a much-loved manga and a much-loathed film, now Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata's Death Note becomes a dynamic, tragicomic stage show. Frank Wildhorn (music,) Ivan Menchell (book) and Jack Murphy's (lyrics) musical adaptation debuted in Japan in 2015 and has had a concert production in London before, but Stephen Whitson's production now gives the fully-staged treatment to the story of a very right-wing teenager who gets to live out his fantasies of being judge, jury and executioner: When Ryuk (Telly Leung,) a Shinigami - a chaotic death god - gets bored of handing out death sentences to random humans, he deliberately misplaces his magic book in the mortal world to see who will pick it up. The Death Note ends up in the hands of Light Yagami (Xander Pang,) a schoolboy with an alarmingly right-wing attitude towards social justice.

Theatre review: Cats

T.S. Eliot is probably best known for The Waste Land, but for a true vision of apocalyptic despair you need only look at the stage version of his book of children's poetry Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. It is of course his famous collaboration with His Exalted Britannic Excellency, Master of all he Surveys, The Right Rev. Dr Baron Dame Sir Andrew Lloyd Lord Webber BA (Hons) MEng, KC, MD, P.I, Mother of Dragons, FSB, which Eliot agreed to primarily because he was much too dead at the time to say no. Eliot won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but Richard Stilgoe was in Countdown's Dictionary Corner quite a lot so he was the next obvious choice to provide additional lyrics for the show's opening, with "Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats" giving a framework.

Stage-to-screen review: Our Town

The comparative theatrical quiet of August often means a chance for me to catch up on some digital versions of shows I'd missed, and NTatHome have just added Thornton Wilder's Our Town, in its recent touring co-production from The Actor Michael Sheen's Welsh National Theatre and the Rose Theatre in Kingston*. Sheen plays the Stage Manager, a figure who it occured to me this time I would be interested to see played quite sinister - Sheen doesn't go there, giving the affable character we usually see, but he does stress the way the play's narrator knows all the dark secrets of how the other characters' lives and deaths will pan out. I also felt we really got the idea of why, within the play's universe at least, it makes sense to give him that title: Especially in the final act he's seen engineering the story and the way it'll be told.

Dance review: The Car Man

For my roughly annual trip away from Dame Theatre to Baroness Dance, it's one of the Matthew Bourne ballets I've managed to miss on its numerous previous visits to London since its 2000 debut. The Car Man is based on Bizet's opera Carmen, although only musically - the story is apparently more directly inspired by The Postman Always Rings Twice. Set in a small town in 1950s America, whose economy seems disproportionately based on the auto repair and cabaret industries for a population of 375, drifter Luca (Will Bozier at tonight's performance) arrives looking for work. He makes quite an impression, seducing both the boss' wife Lana (Eleanor McGrath) and bullied young man Angelo (Harry Ondrak-Wright.) When Lana's husband Dino (Cameron Flynn) catches them, she and Luca kill him and frame Angelo for it.

Theatre review: Cleansed

A pair of fraternal twins are separated; the female twin, believing her brother to be dead, goes to a strange and possibly dangerous place where she takes on his identity, only to reconnect with him in an unexpected way. It's one of the main plots of Twelfth Night, which Sarah Kane cited as an inspiration for Cleansed, but it's fair to say that she interpreted it in a slightly different way than Shakespeare did. A lot more incestuously, for one thing. Grace (Pearl Chanda) tracks down the hospital-like place where her brother Graham (Jack Riddiford) died of a heroin overdose. The body's long since been cremated so she isn't able to say goodbye to him in that way, instead wearing his clothes and starting to take on his mannerisms. She willingly puts herself under the control of Tinker, the violent and twisted man everyone calls a doctor, but who seems to be anything but a healer.

Theatre review: Love's Labour's Lost(Shakespeare's Globe)

I've got a couple of shows planned for later this week notorious for their nudity, and it feels like the theme has started early with Love's Labour's Lost: While everyone more or less keeps their kit on at the Globe, Ned Costello spends much of it in matador pants so tight he might as well be naked. It's all done for highly plot-significant reasons, honest, because Indiana Lown-Collins' production turns the delegation of noble ladies from France into one from Spain, and makes flamenco the show's visual and musical language. The King of Navarre (Costello) has vowed to spend three years in study, his many ascetic rules including no contact with women, and roped his best friends Berowne (Transphobia Ltd Employee Philip Arditti,) Dumaine (Jax Guerrero) and Longaville (Philip Labey) into the agreement.